Home
by DarkPriestessofAssimbya
Summary: AU. At home again, the Count plans.


He is home. He is constantly aware of it, rich heaviness in his veins, the soil beneath him thick with his own magic. He meant to arrive home differently, with crates of English books, typewritten pages, little modern things for each of his wives, but this time he fled, he did not leave of his own will. He knows about fleeing, all too well.

Yet still, he is glad to be there. And they are glad that he is back, he can tell that easily. Ecaterina kisses him with a desperation rare for her, Ileana takes the prey he brings her with gratitude and never a complaint, and Adriana sleeps beside him in his coffin, as she did in the early, terrified days of her Changing. He smells her hair as she lies curled up against him.

He speaks to all of them in Romanian, glad for the familiar words on his tongue again, despite how much he loves English. One night, he brings Ecaterina into the courtyard with him, and tells her in quiet words about the recent events - about Mina, most importantly. She nods and is silent, her blue eyes bright in the moonlight. "You'll like her," he tells her, and hopes it to be true. He never had to say it about Ileana or Adriana, or even Lucy. Mina is the only one he has let go before regaining her.

He spends much time alone in the library, as he always has. The smell of the books reminds him of Mina and Jonathan now, and he imagines his hands on Mina's frail shoulders, pushing her up against one of the bookshelves and then reaching beneath her encumbering layers of Victorian clothing. Through their mental connection he gives her the image, and is rewarded by her shudder, half fear, half desire.

There is little to do but wait. Arrangements with the gypsies are easily made, and here, in his own land, fear for his own life is so distant that he trusts in his plans. He reads _The Decameron _and talks to Mina, alternating between cruelty and kindness often enough to baffle even her logical mind. She is weak, from bloodlust and sunlight, a crucifix around her neck and the suspicious eyes of superstitious villagers upon her forehead. Her mind is weaker than when he first met her, and she barely fights him now when he looks through her eyes and sees where she has come in her travels at the side of the mad Professor.

They get close, so close he thinks he can feel her heartbeat. He listens through Mina's ears as she discusses with the Professor how they shall kill the Count's wives, and, when the Professor has gone to sleep, he rages at her till she weeps silently. He talks to her about Lucy's death, though he knows that is the cruelest thing of all to say to her.

She weakens.

When they are close enough, he has the gypsies (those most corrupt, and most willing to do the terrible for gold) ambush them, kill the Professor and destroy their holy circles of protection. He has threatened them if they do anything to Mina herself, and they obey.

He finds her, scared and alone, at the edges of his mind, and he calls her, gentle.

She comes, knocks on his door like a bedraggled waif in a children's fairy story.

She is scared, like the birds that sometimes fly through the open windows on the top floor of the castle and don't know how to get out again. He almost fears that she shall fly herself into walls. He catches her wrists with his hands and holds her tight, marvelling at the thinness of her wrists, at the frantic pulse in them. She stills as he holds her there, in the entranceway of the castle. "Come with me," he tells her. He does not tell her not to be afraid. He's never lied to her.

He takes her upstairs and strips her clothing off, piece by piece (the hems of her dress and petticoats are torn and muddy. Her underclothes are sticky with cold sweat. Her boots are caked with mud. She has a fever), and then makes her take a bath. He watches her for a while as she lies in the water, as warm as he could make it, and when he is convinced that she will not try to drown herself, he leaves to dispose of her old clothes, locking the door behind him, though he thinks that she is too much of her era to try and run away without any clothing.

As he leaves, the others come to him. They have heard her heartbeat and breathing, and have felt the warmth of her humanity. They jabber questions at him, and he pushes their words aside. "Leave us alone for a time," he commands.

He fetches clothing from the wooden trunk he has marked with Mina's name, and goes back to her. She has stayed still, her eyes closed though she does not sleep. He tells her to get out of the bath, and he dresses her, for her hands are shaky with fear and fever and he does not trust her to do it herself. He has brought a shift, corset, dress, and nothing else - she will not need shoes, not yet, and he will do nothing that might tempt her to flee.

The dress is red, like drying blood. The fact does not escape her, and she fingers the material with trepidation, as though she believes it to actually be be dyed with blood. She swallows, reflexively. Enraptured by his possession of her (it never tires him, this realization of his blood in her veins, the habits of obedience to him slowly being learned - he has seen it with Ecaterina, Ileana and Adriana, and each time he felt he could have watched them forever) he reaches out and touches the hollow of her throat, the soft spot amidst the smooth line of her collarbone. She swallows again. "Please," she murmurs.

"What?" he asks, shifting his hand so that it wraps around half her neck, from there to the back. The skin of her neck is warm with the fever and damp from the bath. He thinks of pressing down, of choking her, of breaking her windpipe, of the little frantic gasps that would issue from her mouth -

"If you tell me not to touch you I'll hit you," he tells her conversationally, shifting his fingers to feel her pulse between them. It's fast, almost faster than it should be, considering that he hasn't bitten her in a month.

"I wasn't going to." It's a whisper.

He tightens his grip, just a little, experimentally. She does gasp. "Yes, you were."

He wants to kiss her. But he wants to kiss her violently, with his fangs extended, drawing blood, and he can tell that she won't be able to manage that yet, not without freezing over like ice and her eyes dulling. He lets go of her neck.

"You need to eat. Mortal food. Come."

He takes ahold of her wrist, not sure she will move without stimulus. She follows him without hesitation, though, and as he leads her through the hallways and down the stairs, he shifts his harsh grip of her wrist into entwining his fingers with hers. Something in that apparently comforts her, for she clutches his hand in return, as though there is nothing else for her to hold on to. Which is, he reflects, true.

They reach the dining room soon enough, and she looks intimidated by the high ceilings and the long table of dark wood. But he knows that cannot be true, and glances at her mind. She is remembering what Jonathan's journal told her of this place. He almost smiles, almost gives her some of his own memories of this room, which include corpses on the table and the floor growing sticky with garishly red blood everywhere, but he decides not to. He leads her to a chair and pulls it out for her, a balancing hand at her shoulderblades. "Sit down," his voice is soft, "I'll get you something to eat."

He lingers to watch the graceful swirl of her skirts as she sits down, and then goes into the kitchen. He can already hear her wet hair starting to drip onto the stone floor. As he leaves, he tells Ecaterina, Ileana, and Adriana that they may come, if they'd like to. He assumes that Mina will be able to manage their presence at this point.

They have little enough mortal food, and most of it is from Jonathan's stay. They have fresh bread, at least - he bought it from the gypsies, knowing that he wouldn't want to change Mina immediately - but, other than that, most everything seems to have gone bad. He slices her an apple, placing it on a plate with the bread, and makes her tea. That ought to comfort her and, at the moment, he does wish to comfort her.

(She drinks it with milk and honey. He knows that, in the same way he imagines Jonathan must know it, as though he always has.)

When he returns, he can see that the others are there, as he knew they would be. He is vividly reminded of finding them attacking Jonathan - there is a resemblance between Jonathan and Mina, almost as though they were siblings rather than husband and wife, and though she is calmer than he was then, she seems just as overwhelmed. Ecaterina's hands are in her hair, and Ileana's fingers are too close to her neck. He feels a sudden, irrational flare of jealousy beneath his skin.

He calls at them in Romanian, because that is what comes first to his tongue, and they scatter to the other side of the table. He remembers belatedly that he hasn't been there consistently in months, and Adriana is flinching at the sound of his voice again.

But dealing with Mina's impulses is more important at that moment than dealing with Adriana's, and he sets down the plate and tea for her before doing anything else. She thanks him, and he thinks it must be a reflex. Only then does he go to the others.

Ileana draws close to him, her voice dissonant. "Are we not to touch _her _either? Is she too precious and fragile to be sullied by us, just like the other one, the one who you preferred to let die rather than bring here -"

Rather than glorifying that with an answer, he backhands her across the face. She curls around herself on the floor, half hissing in that odd way she has.

For a moment, he stops to consider the oddity of Ileana's behavior. It does indeed seem inexplicable until he recalls that she behaved like this when he first brought Adriana there, as well. It's rather like a spoiled child with a younger sibling, he thinks, disgusted.

He decides that cannot wait, and, without a word to any of the others, he pulls Ileana to her feet and leads her from the room, across the castle, and downstairs, where Ileana grinds her teeth together in a useless effort not to scream.

When it is over, he leaves her there, whispering quiet, familiar words to her in Romanian. She nods, and he touches the thick strands of her red-dark hair, murmuring her name like a soothing litany. The next night, he decides, he will bring her some human creature to kill, and will watch the brightness in her eyes. That reassurance, combined with the pain, will work an alchemy to rid her of her routine jealousy.

He returns to the dining room, where he finds Ecaterina and Adriana talking to Mina. She seems calmed now, somewhat, and he is glad that he brought Ileana away. He sits down across from her.

But her food is nearly untouched. "You haven't eaten," he observes.

"No." Her voice is steadier than he expected. A pause. "It doesn't matter, does it?"

There is a question in her eyes, and he can read it without even looking into her mind. "No," he agrees, "it doesn't."

She shivers, violently, though with the fever or with the confirmation of her guess, he cannot tell. After a pause, she stands. The movement seems very sudden, the clattering of the chair against the stone as she pushes it away, nigh deafening. "In that case, I would prefer to get it over with."

She is being very brave, he thinks, though in a way he was rather given to expect from her. He can see her muscles tensing, all over her body, as though in preparation for the endurance of some great pain. He watches her eyes and knows that she is as acutely conscious as he is of the bareness of her pale neck.

"Not here," he says, though he sees the knife he gave her for her food on the table, and imagines stabbing it into the soft spaces between her ribs, cutting a bloody trail through to her still beating heart, "you'll come with me." And he stands, just as abruptly as she did, going to her side and taking ahold of her wrist again. This time, he holds her tightly and pictures his long fingers leaving dark bruises. As they walk out of the room, he doesn't loosen his grip.

Ecaterina and Adriana know better than to follow.

He brings her to one of the bedrooms, the one he speaks of as his own, though he could count on one hand the number of occasions on which he has actually slept there. She looks, trembling with trepidation, at the dark wood of the bedposts, the black of the sheets (it hides bloodstains), and the red of the fabric hung around the bed. He loves her fear. He could show her the knives and rope in the bedside table, and watch her eyes.

But he does not. Neither does he push her down on the bed, his nails gouging bloody patterns in her thighs. There will be time enough for that later, when the cuts will heal up in an hour. He can wait.

He takes a step towards her, gentle, gentle, like approaching a wild animal. He places a palm upon her cheek, and wonders what the cold of his skin feels like to her. "Mine," he murmurs, a lover's whisper.

It is that word which breaks her, in a way she would not be broken if he tied her wrists to his bedpost and held one of his knives against her skin. Her can see her struggling to control her involuntary tears until finally it is they which control her, racking her with sudden sobs. He leads her to the bed and lies down beside her, and she does not fight him. He holds her, still gentle, the warmth of her body a comfort. She keeps crying. He wonders if his touch is making her do so more.

She cries for a long time, silent in his arms. When she finally cries no more, he pushes her hair away from her neck, and lowers his mouth to it. She does not scream as he bites.

He drinks until the fever fades and her skin grows cold, until the soft rhythm of her heartbeat stills. And he holds her even after that, touching the tangled threads of her still-damp hair.

-

It is nights after that when he continues his plans. Mina is doing well, he thinks - there is none of the dullness in her eyes that would herald a broken mind or spirit. And she handles pain well, as he finds out the first time he breaks one of her bones. It is one of the little ones in her wrist, for he finds the brittle thinness of it so beautiful. Tears come to her eyes, and she gasps despite the absence of any need for oxygen in her current state, but there is no fluttering panic.

He is feeding her off his own blood. It is a small mercy, and he is being very cruel in other ways. Some night he shall bring a mortal for her and lock her up until she kills it, but that need not happen so quickly. For now it is enough that he slowly learns how to bring her both pain and pleasure, and she is learning to speak to him (in the library, where she is comfortable, as he knew she would be). Once, he makes her laugh, and wants to kiss her and swallow the sound.

Now, he sits and watches as Ecaterina laces up Mina's corset. "I'd like to put up your hair," she says when she finishes, her accent thick. Some thought in that makes Mina shiver, but he agrees with Ecaterina, despite the fact that he prefers Mina's long dark hair down about her waist. Mina folds her hands in her lap as Ecaterina ties it up. She looks very vulnerable, like a girl dressed up for a formal dinner.

"Now," he says, "what shall you wear to seduce your husband?"

Mina gives him a sharp glare, which he lets go with no punishment but a laugh. Ecaterina picks a dress - one of her own, which he does not like for Mina but does not mind for this purpose - and Mina puts it on obediently. Her eyes are distant. He wants to draw her back to him, with something violent and visceral, but he knows that it is all right if she is distant from him at this moment. He can always draw her back. "Come," he says, standing and extending a hand to her. She takes it, glancing back at Ecaterina (who does like her, as he hoped she would) only briefly before leaving.

The cool air of the night outside must be a shock to Mina after nights locked in the stone rooms of his home, and he lets her savor it for a moment before leading her towards the place where Jonathan and the others have made camp in their panicked confusion after the Professor's death and Mina's disappearance. She is so quiet, as though all his work with her has been undone.

When they get close enough, he draws away. "I shall be watching," he says in warning, and shifts into a bat. No one but her will notice his dark shape against the dark sky.

The events below him are distant. Mina is quiet, but the words she does speak are in a tone he has never heard from her lips. Jonathan sees the fangs in her mouth, but goes with her anyway, clutching her hand as though there is nothing else for him to hold onto. Which, Vlad reflects, is true.

He goes ahead of them and turns back to himself in the entranceway of the castle. Then he has only to wait, for the soft creaking open of the door, just like months ago. Jonathan looks so pale. He shudders as though he has heard his death sentence proclaimed when the door slams shut behind him.

"Welcome to my home," Vlad says.


End file.
